Complexity Is the Builder's Burden

The test of a good financial product isn't what experts admire about it. It's what a complete beginner never has to think about.

We get this backwards constantly. We ship a product and hand the user a glossary — here's what a wallet is, here's a seed phrase, here's what “on-chain” means, here's why the gas fee spiked. And then we call them “not tech-savvy” when they give up.

They didn't fail. The product did.

Every term a first-time user has to learn is a small confession that the builder pushed their own complexity downhill onto the person least equipped to carry it. Real craft is the opposite. It's absorbing the hard parts so completely that someone who has never heard the word “blockchain” — and never should have to — opens the app and simply gets what they came for.

Complexity is the builder's burden. Never the user's.

What financial product finally made sense to someone in your life who “isn't good with money”?